


Skinny and the Duke

by jerseydevious



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Gen, check the a/n for warnings, emotions and ironic satanism in this saloon tonight fellas, the joe chill of good writing declared me an enemy of the state and murdered me at quiznos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 09:41:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17281658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Bruce and Clark get sent backwards through time to the Old West, and, as it would turn out, there's not much to do back in the days before air conditioning and the oldGray Ghosttelevision show.





	Skinny and the Duke

**Author's Note:**

  * For [audreycritter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/gifts).



> Howdy, boys. So here's the skinny. A while ago, I snapped and deleted half the works on my AO3, because it was a weird, terrible, goat-infested, blood-happy night. It was mayhem and chaos and mayhem. But I've decided to rewrite a few of them and do it better this time, so this is the official Jersey-sanctioned rewrite of Personal Violence. This time? Clark has a fucking Stetson. 
> 
> For trigger warnings, hit the nifty "see more A/Ns" button AO3 provides, because AO3 is a dear. I like my emotions and I like my emotions served neat, bartender. So patrons beware.

There were some people in the world Ma said had a jaw like a steel trap—she called it bear-jawed. They kept their ears listening and their tongues still, and there was something safe in the way they watched you while you talked. You knew deep in your heart that they’d never say a word, because their teeth were screwed in tight. Sometimes they’d go _and what happened after that?_ and you’d oblige because politeness is a virtue, after all, and before you know it, it’s been hours and all the two of you have talked about is your embarrassingly long list of awkward high school moments. People like that had a skill and they could use it like a knife.

 

“I didn’t know you could ride a horse,” Clark said, conversationally.

 

“Hn,” Bruce said. “Desert horse chases. You learn fast.”

 

Clark tilted his head. “Have you ever ridden a camel?”

 

“Once. For a week.”

 

Clark adjusted the bill of his hat, glaring out at the sun across the dry and cracked earth. When they’d landed back in time they’d landed in full cowboy get-up; Clark had brown leather chaps a blue denim shirt, and just a splash of red in a bandana about his neck. Clark was worried Bruce would drop of heat stroke any second—he was covered head-to-toe in black and on top of all that was a black trenchcoat and gloves, as if they were in North Dakota and not New Mexico.

 

“A whole week?” Clark asked. “Wouldn’t that get a mite uncomfortable?”

 

“I’d rather be set on fire. And I have been set on fire.” Bruce rubbed at his face with his shirt. “Tell me there’s a damn—what is it called—whatever you call a Western bar around here.”

 

“Saloon,” Clark said. “Please tell me you’ve seen a John Wayne movie.”

 

“Am I related to him,” Bruce said.

 

Clark chuckled. “That’s just a stage name—Lord, I watched those movies with my Ma all the time. She’s kinda in love with him.”

 

“How interesting,” Bruce said, in exactly the voice that made it clear Clark would simply just have to explain further.

 

“She used to play cowboys with me as a kid,” Clark said. “We’d steal some of Pa’s hats and run around the one tree we’ve got in the yard, only tree for miles. I used to have one of those sticks, with a horse’s head on the end.”

 

Bruce said nothing, just nudged his big dark stallion into a trot. Clark followed suit—his stocky paint had a bumpy, uncomfortable trot, but he’d be alright. He couldn’t exactly get saddlesore.

 

“Everyone’s got that game, as a kid,” Clark said.

 

“Dick’s is _The Three Musketeers,”_ Bruce said, the corner of his lips ticking up. “And _Robin Hood._ He never puts that book down. He’s made me watch that movie so much I’ve got the whole damn thing memorized.”

 

“Prove it.”

 

“Long ago, good King Richard of England departed for the holy land on a great crusade—”

 

Clark waved a hand, laughing. “He’s got you wrapped around his finger, doesn’t he, the rascal.”

 

The corners of Bruce’s mouth pulled up even higher, turning into what was, maybe, a genuine smile.

 

“I’m betting a twenty you were a cops and robbers kid.”

 

“Close. Remember that old show from the sixties, _Gray Ghost?_ Every time he’d hit someone a big _pow_ would go across the screen. That was mine,” Bruce said.

 

Clark hummed. “When was that?”

 

“Sixty six.”

 

“I was three,” Clark said. “So, uh, no.”

 

“Stop making me feel old,” Bruce growled.

 

At a trot they were at the town in no time, getting suspicious looks from the locals, their hands drawing to their guns. Clark might be the one who was bulletproof, but Bruce was the one that looked it, and it set everyone on edge.

 

“Our horses are going to get stolen,” Clark said, hitching his paint by the bridle.

 

Bruce shrugged. “If Diana pulls through, we won’t need them.”

 

Clark patted his horse’s neck. “Thanks,” he said. He got a soft whinny in response, and Clark stooped to kiss her muzzle.

 

Bruce was already by the door. Clark had barely noticed him move. “Can you stop braiding a friendship bracelet for its hooves and move the hell on already.”

 

“Maybe if you can pull out whatever crawled down your throat and died,” Clark called back.

 

Bruce was bear-jawed. He was one of those people. Clark himself was somewhere between talkative and a mouse, but around Bruce he could be a real motormouth, because Bruce would never tell a soul. He had a steel trap on his face and he kept hundreds of secrets behind it, and Clark knew it never bothered him. With Bruce it felt like he’d known the man twenty years instead of two—he felt like he could tell Bruce near anything and it’d be kept safe, tucked away, inside a human lockbox. And Bruce could draw it out of him, too. Bruce had a gnarled voice, both uncommonly gravelly and uncommonly deep, and Clark supposed he spoke like that to scare people, but he never seemed to be able to switch it off. Yet somehow Bruce could make a voice like that gentle, inviting. _Go on._

 

The saloon didn’t go quiet the second they entered, like in the movies. Clark led the way and pulled together two stools at the bar—Bruce crouched against the wood like he was trying to disappear, and Clark leaned his elbows and back against it, limbs sprawling out. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t giddy down deep to be in the full get-up, sitting in a real life saloon like he’d seen in all those movies as a kid—Christ, he’d had his Ma drag an old stool in from the barn and pull down some of Pa’s beer mugs so he could pretend at the kitchen counter. His Ma would walk in with a swagger in his step and say, _I’m here to take in the ole ranger Clark Joe for bustin’ my posse,_ and Clark would fake spitting in a jar (his Ma wouldn’t let him do it for real) and go, _just try an’ take me, rascal!_

 

“How long will it take for a fight to break out?” Clark asked. “My bet’s on five.”

 

“No. Ten. They’re all drunk.”  
  
  


The correct answer was somewhere down the middle. Eventually a young man with twenty notches on his belt sidled up and raised his pistol and pressed it to the back of Bruce’s head.

 

“Get out of my town,” the man hissed. “None the likes of you walk in here. Don’t you know who I am?”

 

“Can’t say I do,” Clark said. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Bruce’s facial expression go from morning frost to pack ice.

 

“Guns,” and here Bruce took a sip of his mug of water and dropped it with a final thud on the table, “make me angry.” Then he whipped around and cracked the man’s arm in half. He dropped to the ground, howling.

 

The man roared, and several others leapt up—five of them, each about average height, sun-worn and about as tough as old leather. The man closest to Bruce reached out for his throat and Bruce splashed the water in his mug over the man’s face and then cracked him over the head with it. He dropped like a sack of potatoes, mewling and clutching his head.

 

The man in the middle slipped a pistol out of his belt. “No one gets to do that to ole Red. Now,” he said, voice low, “which ‘un of you fellas bites it?”

 

“I say we draw straws, Bruce,” Clark said, casually.

 

Bruce grumbled something under his breath, and then: “I always draw the short one.”

 

The goon smiled with coyote teeth and turned his pistol towards Bruce—the gun fired, and then Clark’s hand shot out like a rattlesnake and caught the bullet. He raised it up between his thumb and forefinger, blew an imaginary speck of dust off it, and cheerily said, “You missed.”

 

The saloon was dead silent. The posse that had gathered up in front of them stumbled back as one, the man in the middle with the pistol looking white as a ghost. “Y—you,” he choked out.

 

Bruce had turned around and was leaning over the bar, reaching over to grab another mug. “Clark sold his soul to the Devil. Hail Satan. Do any of you keep any clean damn glasses around here.”

 

Clark smiled and winked. “You heard the man. Hail Satan.”

 

As it turned out, being an unkillable Devil worshiper would clear a place out pretty quick. It took less than five minutes for the place to clear out entirely, leaving behind a total wreck of a perfect set for a John Wayne movie.

 

“How long before we have to deal with people throwing holy water at us, you think?” Clark asked, peering out the door. It didn’t look like anyone had stolen their horses, or even shot them. He’d picked a table close to the window, though, so at least he wasn’t constantly using x-ray vision to check up on them.

 

Bruce polished off his second mug of water. “Holy water isn’t bad,” he said. “It tastes like stale tap water. It’s the stakes and gasoline that are bad.”

 

Clark tilted his head. “Stakes and gasoline?”

 

“Didn’t you know Batman’s either a vampire or a product of witchcraft. I thought you were an investigative journalist, Clark.”

 

Clark’s brows drew together. “Huh. I didn’t think people would do that. Hey, before you come over here, pour me one?”  
  


Bruce raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

 

“What?” Clark said. “I have a cowboy hat on and I’m in a saloon. We just had a cowboy bar fight! There’s no way I’m not getting Old West beer right now, I’m sorry.”

 

Bruce grunted, but he brought Clark a mug anyway. Clark took a tentative sip.

 

Bruce settled in the chair across from him and kicked it back, arms folded over his stomach. “Well?”

 

Clark swallowed and shuttered. “Gross,” he said. “But I’m doing it for younger me. Younger me would punch me if I didn’t.”

 

“That’s not how it works,” Bruce said. “You _are_ younger you. You just got older.”

 

Clark sipped his disgusting beer and chewed on that, for a minute—Clark still kept a shelf for Western novels, and Bruce had made cops and robbers into a life. He wondered what _Robin Hood_ and _The Three Musketeers_ would look like on Dick, when he grew up. It was hard to imagine Dick ever getting older.

 

Bruce groaned and shucked off his trenchcoat, tossed away his hat, and tore off the bandana around his throat. “New Mexico was a mistake and should be wiped off the Earth,” he snarled. “It’s approximately fifteen hundred degrees.”

 

“Approximately fifteen hundred?”

 

Bruce glared at him. “Yes, excuse my error. _Absolutely_ fifteen hundred degrees.”

 

“I actually think swimming in the sun is quite relaxing,” Clark said.

 

“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”

 

Clark grinned and took another sip of his beer. “Okay, I have a question,” he said.

 

Bruce snapped up and looked around. “Do you think anyone left a deck of cards?”

 

Clark’s eyes got numb the way they did, and he flicked his x-ray vision around. “There’s a pack beneath the booth over there.”

 

Bruce rose and returned with a well-worn and bent set of playing cards bound with twine. Clark popped the twine with his fingers and shuffled the cards. “What are we playing?”

 

“Anything,” Bruce said. “We’ve got nothing but time. It’s Jordan and Diana we left behind. Diana can do near anything but Jordan can destroy near anything.”

 

Clark stretched out, enjoying the pleasant pull in his muscles. “You need to cut Hal a break. Ever played Oklahoma Gin?”

 

“Never even heard of it.”

 

“It’s easy. I’ll deal.” Clark shuffled out a round of ten cards each, and dropped the rest in the center of the table, over a faded blood stain. Everything in the saloon smelled like dust, hay, alcohol, and blood, which Clark thought was maybe just the way the West smelled.

 

“Organize your cards, however’s fine,” Clark said. “I organize ‘em by number. First you take a card from the draw pile. You get to choose—you can choose whether to take the first draw, and if you don’t, I can. If I refuse, you have to.”

 

“That’s a lot of refusing,” Bruce said. He was studying his cards with a careful blue-gray eye, as if they held all the secrets to time itself and the one equation that would explain every pattern in the universe.

 

“You play to a hundred points. The very first card in the pile is turned upwards, and that card makes the limit on how many points you can have left in your hand when you knock. If I flip up a six, that means six points or fewer. You try to make sets. If you knock without any unmatched cards, you go gin, and you get twenty points. And the other player doesn’t get any.”

 

Bruce huffed. “Frustrating. And knocking is going in, I suppose.”

 

“Yeah. You spread your unmatched cards on the table, but it’s gotta be less than the first card. If you knock and your count is lower than mine, you score the difference between the two. If you knock and you’ve got more points in your hand, or if you don’t go gin, or if we’ve got equal values, the other player gets ten points.”

 

Bruce made a get on with it gesture—with entirely too dramatic a flourish—and Clark flipped over the top card. A two.

 

“Aw, hell,” Clark said.

 

“Don’t invoke your lord Satan to try and win,” Bruce said, sharply.

 

Clark laughed, with a wide smile. “I sold my soul, remember? Brimstone’s in me.”

 

“The power of Christ compels you,” Bruce muttered, and drew a card.

 

Clark shifted in his seat, laying his ankle over his knee. He listened out for the horses, who seemed to be relaxing next to their post, docile as trail ponies. They’d good and well left the saloon in total disarray; the crowd had crashed through the doors like angry bulls. Chairs and stools were overturned and mugs had clattered and shattered against the creaky wood floor, and beer was splashed around like it’d poured from the sky.

 

“Back to my question,” Clark said. “You mentioned something about stakes.”

 

“Mhm.”

 

“Have you ever actually been staked?”

 

“Yes,” Bruce said. “Once. In my first year. Got held down by a group of concerned suburban parents and had a stake driven through my stomach. Splinters like you wouldn’t believe.”

 

“There’s no way you’re not bullshitting me right now,” Clark said, dropping a three of spades on the discard pile.

 

“If you must,” Bruce said, and there was a distinct British inflection there. It warmed Clark’s heart, really, to see the extent to which Bruce resembled the man who raised him.

 

Bruce sat up and pulled his shirt open, rolling up the white undershirt beneath—and before the shock set in, Clark dimly thought _this is the most skin on him I’ve ever seen._ Surrounded by a layer of scars was an ugly, circular, puckered scar that looked dark and ugly.

 

“I’ll be damned,” Clark said, weakly.

 

“Draw before I throw something at you.”

 

Clark pulled a five of hearts from the deck. Nearly enough for a match. “I kinda—y’know, maybe it’s ‘cause I’m invulnerable. Even getting hurt by Kryptonite, it heals all the way. But that… looks like it smarted something fierce.”

 

“People are naturally repulsed greatly by scars,” Bruce said. He spread a match—eight of clubs—over the table. “It’s not only you. It’s grotesque.”

 

“Now,” Clark said, “I’ve got to call bullshit on that one. You’ve got a nice usage of that SAT word but there’s nothing about that sentence that’s even remotely correct. Scars are stories. They’re human.”

 

“How very bold of you to say, considering the fact that you aren’t.”

 

Clark took the discarded twine from the deck, tied it in a knot, and threw it at Bruce’s face. It bounced harmlessly off his nose. “You hush up.”

 

Bruce’s brows pinched together and he looked down at the table, glaring, before he gritted out, “Forgive me.”

 

“You get closer to a proper _sorry_ every day.”

 

“You’re wearing me down,” Bruce grumbled. “This hand is a waste. You’ve rigged it.”

 

“You’re offending my honor,” Clark insisted. He picked up a card, which turned out to be totally useless. “And you’re wrong, it’s my hand that’s a waste. Can I ask about the big one that kind of looks like the Grand Canyon?”

 

Bruce threw his head back and laughed, a deep belly laugh. He pulled up his shirt again and twisted to the side, showing a deep brown-and-purple ripple that stopped about six inches from his armpit. “Grand Canyon, huh. Sickle. In Russia. I recognize the irony. Most of my scars are from training, or my first year. I’ve gotten better.”

 

And you’ve got a tiny firecracker with a smart mouth beside you, Clark didn’t say. “You’ve got a couple there that look like bullet holes.”

 

Bruce pulled up his shirt and tapped the palest one with a crooked index finger. “The night I decided on Batman.”

 

Clark hummed. “Y’know, I’ve known you two years, and I’ve never asked. I told you all my embarrassing learning to alien stories. Have I unlocked the level of friendship to ask about the bat thing?”

 

Bruce sighed, and laid his cards flat on the table and folded his hands over his mouth. “You can get it because you told me about getting your foot stuck in the locker room wall. The Manor is built on top of a system of caves, you know this. When I was a boy I fell into one of them and broke my arm. I was down there in the dark with the bats for most of the day, and I… developed a phobia, after. The night… you understand I waited seventeen years. I tried what I knew. It failed. I needed to scare the guilty, and I didn’t know how. I was a damn fool. So I ran out of patience and I dragged myself to a chair in the study and bled out. And then a bat crashed through the window, and… that was that. Batman.”

 

Clark studied his worn boots. “You would have died,” he said, evenly.

 

“Yes,” Bruce said.

 

There was something watchful about his gaze—careful, monitored. Bruce wasn’t feeling talkative. He was sharing with distinct purpose, the way he did everything. The skill that Bruce had mastered and worked so hard to master, beyond anything else, was endurance—neither the fastest nor the strongest, but the one who would last longest. Every move was measured and weighed against a set of factors like a predator considering its prey. He was slow and methodical the way polar bears were, the way they waited on the sea ice waiting for a seal to come up for air and then _—crack._ And it was something Clark understood, because when Clark felt rage his only outlet was to swallow it, because his rage could crack the world in half. He could kill millions in a minute if he wasn’t careful. But again there was something different, because at least Clark could let his mind fall apart after hell struck, go home and recover; but Bruce never could, never would. Polar bears couldn’t afford to stop watching.

 

“What about the one on your neck?” Clark asked. He spread a few cards across the table “Looks like it damn near killed you.”

 

“It did. My heart stopped for four minutes.” Bruce’s face took on that slinking look like he was planning something, vicious behind impenetrable walls. “I stabbed myself in the throat with a butcher knife. I was seventeen. It permanently injured my vocal chords.”

 

“Holy shit,” Clark said, before he could stop himself. Clark’s chest constricted like it’d been locked into a vise and it took a full minute for the pressure to ease—all he could think of was Bruce’s grip on the knife, pushing it in deeper even as the blood gushed up around the blade. Clark would bet that the reason Bruce survived at all was the knife itself, in great cosmic irony, because it would have helped stem blood loss if only partially. He’d been so _young._ It was lucky Bruce could speak at all—that growling, rough voice _—I needed to scare the guilty._

 

“You want to tell me scars aren’t grotesque now,” Bruce said, flatly. He drew a card, and laid down a match. “Finally, goddammit.”

 

“Six of hearts. I’m crushing you,” Clark said. “And no, that’s not what I was thinking. What I was thinking was—in _East of Eden,_ there’s a character, Adam’s mom, and she commits suicide. She drowns herself in a puddle only a couple inches deep. And there’s this line, about how steel-spined she must’ve been, because she forced herself to drown in that puddle. I was thinking about how determined you had to be, to put a knife through your throat like that. You must’ve been hurting. Really hurting, I mean.”

 

“It was _ineffably_ insane,” Bruce snarled. He’d risen slightly from his comfortable slouch, shoulders raised, and Clark knew that he’d just about pulled the wind from Clark’s sails. “I was _mad.”_

 

Clark waited and considered his cards until Bruce’s shoulders relaxed, until he could tell Bruce was comfortable in his win, and then said, “I don’t think you were. I think you were in pain, and pain’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re still here. You survived that. You _keep_ surviving. Me? I’m proud to call you my best friend. Now stop trying to convince me not to be, or I’ll throw something at you.”

 

Clark slapped down his cards. “By the way,” he said, grinning. “I call gin.”

 

For forty minutes they played together in silence. Bruce would only look up from his cards long enough to draw, and sometimes he’d freeze, like some glacier in his brain had positively cracked through. Clark ended up winning a couple more rounds, because Bruce played placidly.

 

Clark occasionally reached out with his hearing to check on the horses, and the town around them—the sun was starting to sink and the nightlife of the desert was stirring. Clark kept an ear on the distance and one on the flick of cards, until Bruce spoke in a soft voice:

 

“If you would,” he began, “if I may. Brothers, I think, is the word. If… you would.”

 

Clark grinned at him, ear-to-ear. He dropped his elbow on the table and raised his hand. “Brothers.” Bruce gripped his hand back, in a tight squeeze, and looked away.

 

“It’s like pulling to teeth to talk like this,” Clark said. “You make it easy. Sometimes I feel like I’ve known you twenty years, instead of two. I think you’ve got all the blackmail on me you’ll ever need.”

 

Bruce’s eyes snapped back up and he looked at Clark like he’d gone and grown two heads. “It isn’t,” he said. “Hard, I mean. You’re Superman.”

 

He said it like an concrete fact of the Earth, like a blue sky or a sun setting in the west, as if it was a simple equation that made every pattern in the universe fall into place. Clark stared at him, completely dumbfounded, and Bruce just ignored him—he bent down to pick up his hat and he kicked up his feet on the table, and then draped his hat over his face. _You’re Superman._

 

Clark gathered up the cards and murmured to himself, “Guess it’s solitaire.” There was a brief snort from under the hat, and Clark chuckled.

 

_You’re Superman._

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for attempted suicide. Twice. One is more active than the other. As it would turn out Batman does not, how shall we say, fuck around. 
> 
> Here's the new, improved version! I hope it was at the very least enjoyable. I was writing this all day and then I saw the new Heroes in Crisis issue had gone and said Clark would just _let_ therapy tapes of Bruce's get leaked, which I thought was hilarious, because I was writing the literal opposite. An entire fic dedicated to how Superbros feel safe around each other. Who is Tom King. That wild man is not in my phone contacts and he's not invited to my Superbros roller rink made of emotions.


End file.
